Git : How to fix issues in a merged branch

Sometime back we faced a peculiar problem in our project where we have to fix some issue introduced due to a merged branch. To explain this problem first I've to explain the way we manage branches. As we entered in the maintenance mode of project there was a dire need of fixing issues and working on change requests in isolation. Whenever we need to fix an issue we cut a issue-branch out of main branch fix that issue in isolation and after verifying and making sure the issue is fixed we merge that issue-branch back in main branch. The issue we faced with the approach is that after merging an issue branch with the main branch sometimes we came across some regression bugs due to the issue branch. There were two possible solutions to overcome the problem.

First solution is to fix the issue in issue branch and merge the issue branch again with master. This solution can work but the problem with this approach is that till the time you haven't fixed the issue introduced due to issue branch and merged it back with master branch you can not create a new issue-branch and much bigger problem is you can't release.

The second solution is if we can somehow revert the merge of issue branch with main branch and then fix the issue in issue-branch, after that merging the fixed issue branch with the main branch. This approach seems to be straight forward and more logical. Git comes up with a cool command git-revert which can revert existing commits and even revert merge of another branch. I'll talk about the solution in the next blog ;)